Texas A-F grades make low-income schools look worse, analysis shows

Arguably the biggest complaint about the new A-F school accountability system in Texas is that it unfairly penalizes campuses with high numbers of low-income students.

An American-Statesman analysis of preliminary A-F grades issued last month shows that the schools with the poorest student populations in Texas were up to 30 percent more likely than their wealthier peers to earn a failing letter grade in at least one of the four categories. The analysis did not include alternative education campuses.

The socioeconomic disparity was even wider in Central Texas schools. Eighty percent of campuses where 60 to 80 percent of the students come from low-income families received at least one failing letter grade. Schools with the lowest percentages of poor students were nearly 50 percent less likely to post a failing mark.